Spontaneous Increases in Entropy
by LittleBlueNayru
Summary: Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Triforce wielders are no exception to the rule.  THREESHOT.
1. Dirge of Power

Disclaimer: I don't own the Legend of Zelda.

Three little anecdotes, three spontaneous increases in entropy, three musings into three sad, sorry truths about the world.

_**Please note: **If you would like to debate any of these "truths" with me at greater length, please do NOT debate in any review you might leave. Please leave a PRIVATE MESSAGE saying you wish to debate, instead of a writing a review concentrating solely on what is not even the main issue of each chapter. Thank you._

This is the story of King Ganondorf Dragmire, told during the timeline of Ocarina of Time.

* * *

**Increase in Entropy 1 of 3:**

Dirge of Power**  
**

When I was born, I lived amid the merciless dunes of the desert. The arid, sand-filled winds tore at my people, morning, noon, and night.

Our tribe was small, and tight-knit by necessity. The hunters and gardeners, craftspeople and caretakers and leaders all needed to work together with a cooperation unparalleled in order to survive. Should any one person fall, all the rest would feel the burden.

All were female save for me. As the sole male born to the tribe once a century, I would be next in line to assume leadership of the tribe. My two godmothers watched over it during my youth, two accomplished witches adept at elemental and dark magic.

But despite my kingship, we would all be almost equals. I suffered the same hardships as the rest of my tribe; I fought for my food and my life, I learned the skills needed to live on next to nothing, I shared the happiness and pains with every other woman in the tribe. Though I would take the role of leader, this was something symbolic more than anything. I would have to listen to each and every voice and make decisions based on them, and then do more than my part to see those decisions enacted. I would be a general of war and a common soldier, a craftsman, huntsman, and caretaker, a ruler and my own subject.

Then, in the east, came war.

We fought only to defend what little we had, what those of the East would not bother to take except to lay claim to it in title. That enraged me more than anything; that in the East, on fertile plains where no one should want of food and adequate shelter and a feeling of safety none of my people ever had the chance to feel once in their life amidst the desert wilds, man had room to be greedy, narcissistic, and unequal. The hierarchies filled me with a deep, dark fury; social restraints meant to better the lucky few, stronger of will! Even with all these abundant resources of fertile land, fresh sources of water, and a mild climate, many people, subjugated by the few, want of food. Those few, who sent the many to war to gain every more resources they could put to waste, pitting them against enemy after enemy with an identical goal. Drowning the fields of sweet green in showers of blood!

Perhaps the slaughter would eventually be for the better. Weakened and lacking in numbers, the greedy would not be able to control the masses they ruled with an iron fist. Towards the end of their fighting, I led my people onwards from our western canyons leading to the desert to the threshold of their battlefields, to put the fighting to an end, even if by a show of force. The races of the Hyrulean valley, the Gorons, the Zoras, the Hylians, and the Humans, all came together to sign a treaty and lay down their arms. They came together in the center of the wasteland they hew, surrounded by dying men and dying flames and dying fields, to work together and breathe life into it all once again.

And I was naïve enough to think they would do it correctly.

They just made things worse.

Instead of realizing how weak their forces were, and opting for a more egalitarian society, the other tribes pooled their resources together and voted to unify the land they fought over under the flag of the Hylian King. Once again the pompous royal standard was raised, the castles and palaces rebuilt better than ever, the tribes repopulated... and for the common people, it was almost worse for them than before the war. Their situation hadn't changed much, except that the people in it had multiplied.

And they included my people in it. My land became a new province of the Nation of Hyrule, ruled by a simpering, exorbitant King out of touch with the majority of his people, making me the representative of my tribe. And we were forced to pay _tribute_, from what little we had.

I tried so hard to convince the Hylian court that the current regime was unfair, ineffective, corrupt. The royalty, nobles, and even better-off peasants gave me strange looks, muttering behind my back about the strange, alien nature of my own culture.

Words would not work. I was left only with force.

The coup on Hyrule Castle spilled more blood than I would have liked. I honestly wished that the King would simply surrender to me. After all, I was going to usher in an age of enlightenment, in which cooperation between peoples would be more important than anything, in which a leader's only role was to coordinate, and not command. A simple surrender would have spared the King the fate of death and given him the chance to accept a new role in life, one where he was just as free, just as equal, as every other man, and just as happy.

The Princess thought to thwart my plan by sending that green-garbed boy to retrieve the Spiritual Stones before I could. But instead, he has opened the door for me, and led the way. With the power of the Triforce, I can make this dream of mine a reality.

And when I touch it, the world goes dark.

The fertile fields become wastelands, as bare and lifeless as my own desert dunes. Monstrosities appear on the plains and terrify and kill the people there. The rivers freeze, the volcano rages uncontrollably. The sky darkens perpetually, and the people despair.

How can this be? My intentions are good, for the betterment of all, despite how I have been forced to enact them. The little pockets of rebellion still loyal to the greedy former king had to be quelled, but how can that make me an evil person? I have everyone's best interests at heart! I am a kind, benevolent king!

…

Aren't I?

* * *

_When a man seeks pure equality he creates inequality._

_The age of nomadic, migratory societies was therefore the golden age of man, and the dream of today's common man. By the nature of a civilization, a ruler, and hence, a ruling class, must inevitably rise to keep the order of the civilization. Thus, a government. In any civilization that can flourish and not just survive, a pure anarchical, communistic, or Utopian order is rendered impossible to achieve, both by civilization's need for a ruling class to maintain the order and the need and greed of man to profit from what he does.  
_


	2. Elegy of Courage

Disclaimer: I don't own the Legend of Zelda.

This is the story of the Hero of Hyrule, Link, with Twilight Princess Link as the example. Told from Link's point of view.

* * *

**Increase in Entropy 2 of 3:**

Elegy of Courage

When I first saw the monsters, I panicked.

The sight of that lone Bokoblin sent my heart pounding wildly against my ribcage. It held a club, its mind fixed on the goal of killing. It would not let me pass unchallenged. Here, in front of me, was something so very _real_ that could actually, truly, _kill me_. So I froze at the entrance to the woods, and stared with horror and morbid fascination as it paced. It would kill me if it got the chance it _would_ actually _kill me_.

It caught sight of me, raised its mace, and charged.

A part of my mind detached, split itself from reality with a solid chasm in my mind from the finite and the infinite, the fleeting and the everlasting, the larger picture and the insignificant details. Adrenaline surged, singing life in my blood, pumping deliciously and real. Time seemed to slow for the part of my mind that lay on the horizon, outside of everything, and it danced on the edge of my cheap blade between life and death the balance held in a limp grasp. I was on the other side of myself. I was wholly and completely _alive_. Here, in this fight for survival, I was Farore's masterpiece, the true ability of all her offspring_, _the chosen warrior.

That was how I coped.

Being raised a farmer, of course I had to occasionally kill the animals for food or dispatch of the old and ill, but with these mindless creatures that still somehow had an intelligence, the kill was so different. These monsters had goals, if disgusting, malevolent ones, and they moved through life with a purpose, however terrible it was. Though their ghastly faces prevented me from empathizing with them, each time my blade, my arrows, my _will_ cleaved off their heads or put a screeching stop to the beating of their black hearts, I likened it to the murder of a fellow human.

And it felt so wrong. To detach myself, to feel nothing, was the only way to blaze through the mammoth dungeons efficiently, to make the fields of Hyrule safe for the weak. I refused to feel the blade in my hands pulse with malicious glee as it drank the blood of monsters greedily, insatiably. A haze, a wonderful immaterial shroud would descend over my eyes as I battled, destroying whole battalions of enemies with the sharp eyes of the blue-eyed beast that saw nothing, banishing themselves to darkness rather than truly watch, with perfect clarity, carnage fit only for Hell spread across the fields like a viral blemish, ever growing. My heart, pounding in my ears, muffled the sounds of the screaming, the dying, and for that I was thankful.

Numbness is a wicked, wicked drug.

This unfeeling, this self-imposed and self-supported blindness and deafness, these things became second nature to me as I, the hero garbed in green, made my slow steady way across the winding land, proving my mettle as I went. It was a reflex, a reaction. Every time I drew my sword on an enemy a crouched into a fighting stance, my eyes clouded over with blind clarity, my eyes with sharp deafness, my heat with painful apathy. It became second nature. My way to live. My long, desperate travels hardened me to the world and to the battlefield, and before long I did not have to mentally prepare myself for my battles and pause afterwards to recover from them.

I no longer had to think about it at all. Until Blizzeta.

The Mirror changed her, it's the Mirror's evil I'm fighting, I had to keep reminding myself. But even with her red eyes and her gutteral screams, I kept seeing Yeta, the warm, motherly yeti who tried her best to guide us through her and her husband's labyrinth-like manor through her delerium. A kind, sweet, _human_ creature. Even now, how could I kill her?

I pounded at the Ice Mass with my ball-and-chain desperately, mind racing as to how to overcome this dilemma. The fractured part of my mind that grew numb in battle fought to surface, to help me survive, but how could my own human, emphatic side allow the cold-blooded murder of a possessed innocent? When Midna, the enticing numbness, and fatigued desperation all worked together to make my heart submit, I accepted that maybe, in this struggle between entire worlds, not all innocent lives could be saved. And I aimed for the kill.

Thankfully, it never came to that. But from then on, I was able to fight with even more ruthless efficiency than before; no monster could escape their deserved fate by hiding behind human-shaped masks.

The Usurper King Zant might have been beyond redemption, but it was too large a risk allowing him to repent for his crimes. Midna dispatched him suddenly, cleanly, although at a bit of a shocking high speed. Puppet Zelda, the figurine of a human's shell, made me stop for only a moment when it mocked me with Ganondorf's voice. But it was Ganondorf, and not Zelda, and so I retaliated. And Ganondorf, he was beyond salvation. His only destination was the void of the Evil Realm, sealed by death.

I traveled on through the world after I deemed my quest to save Hyrule completed. I wandered almost aimlessly, felling any monster, bandit, or thief that came across my path. When finally I had determined that it was high time to return to Hyrule, Princess Zelda rewarded me for my steadfast support in her time of need with the fancy high-ranking title of Army General and a sword of sharpest gilded gold to replace the Master Sword I had returned to its rightful place in the sunlit Sacred Grove. With my courage and experience, and her foresight and wisdom, we fought many battles in the name of Hyrule; ones to defend, ones to attack, ones to conquer. We always emerged victorious. For we had the grace of the gods shining upon us, the proof embedded in our hands, and where she pointed her finger I would make her enemies fall.

I was the Hero of Hyrule.

…

Right?

* * *

_To kill, we must sacrifice a part of ourselves. The part that feels for what we do. When we raise a knife to run it through a heart, we also take a metaphorical dagger and shave away our morality, layer by paper-thin layer._

_And become completely, utterly numb.  
_


End file.
